Saturday 5 June 2010

Urban Legends: Bloody Mary - Horror Film Review


Urban Legends: Bloody Mary is the third film in the Urban Legend series.  This time the film is more supernatural, and again is unrelated for the most part to the previous 2 films.

Three girls having a sleepover accidentally summon an angry spirit of a girl killed when a high school prank went wrong in the 60's.  After a similar prank is played on the girls by some bullies the bullies start to be killed off one by one via methods relating to urban legends by an unknown assailant.  One of the girls, and her twin brother decide to investigate the origins of the Mary girl in a bid to not only stop any more people being killed, but to put Marys spirit to rest.

The film was nearly good.  It has original death scenes, and entertaining ones, yet the whole story is such a mess of unresolved plot threads, and giant plot holes that the film just collapses upon itself.  It is a fun film, just not good.  The plot holes are frustrating, and numerous.  Key characters go off screen never to be seen again, or mentioned, a characters ability to predict the urban legend deaths is never explained, and just why does an angry spirit go to the bother of killing people in the style of urban legends anyway?


The special effects are good, and at the same time terrible.  The deaths are all cool to see.  A man who urinates on an electric fence, a man who has his dog hung up in his wardrobe with words written in blood next to it saying 'people can lick too', and a girl who has a really disgusting death of hundreds of baby spiders burst out of a lump she finds on her face, who then falls over into a mirror, getting a shard of mirror jammed in her forehead, and then rips out the glass taking off half her face with it!  Unfortunately there is a reliance on CGI meaning the spider scene is muted somewhat by the spiders being blatantly computer generated (still turned my stomach mind!)

The main female lead for some reason has a psychic connection to the ghost which leads to some jump moments, or least that's what it tries to lead to. The film never really decides if it wants the deaths to have been caused by Mary, or by the human slasher that is also doing the rounds.

There are some clever nods to the previous films, well to Urban Legend 2 anyway.  Doing research the main character discovers a newspaper report about the professor from Urban Legends, and a man watching porn in a motel is actually watching cleverly edited scenes of a love scene from Urban Legends 2!

The film was straight to DVD, but does look quite slick.  I did enjoy the film, just that the plot is nonsensical, and some of the acting is highly suspect.

SCORE:

No comments: